News

The latest issue of News from the Institute of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth (NAB), the annual report of the Institute for African Studies (IAS) features an article marking the completion of the Africa’s Infrastructure Globalities (INFRAGLOB) project (2018–2025), funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Prof. Dr. Jana Hönke at the Chair for Sociology in Africa, University of Bayreuth.

The INFRAGLOB project explores how Chinese and Brazilian infrastructure projects in Africa transform governance, revealing diverse corporate practices, local contestation, and the reconfiguration of South–South relations. Through extensive field research across African contexts, researchers investigated how governance models travel, adapt, and become embedded in local practices and how contentious interactions shape corporate behavior on the ground.

From Chinese mining in Guinea and port construction in Kenya to Brazilian extractive projects in Mozambique, INFRAGLOB’s findings challenge the notion of uniform “Chinese” or “Brazilian” models. Instead, they illuminate a complex mosaic of practices influenced by international standards, African regulations, and local political interests. The project provides new insight into how professionals from the Global South negotiate expertise, identity, and power within transnational communities of practice.

A major outcome of the project is the open-access edited volume Africa’s Global Infrastructures (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2024), alongside numerous journal articles in African Affairs, Global Society, Mobilities, The Extractive Industries and Society, and World Development. The team’s work has been presented at leading international conferences as well as at book launch events in Beijing and Shanghai, where the findings were shared with scholars and practitioners from across the Global South.

By uncovering how emerging actors, professionals, and local communities reshape global governance “from below,” INFRAGLOB contributes to a more nuanced understanding of fragmented and plural globalities in an increasingly polycentric world order.

Find the latest NAB issue and the article here.